Listhings blog

2012-05-14

Check-check-checklists have arrived

For quite some time I’ve wondered why the heck didn’t I do this earlier. (Even the Listhings icon features a nice little checklist!)

Here they are. Checklists. Pick as many as you like. They come in all your favorite familiar colors. This is how they will look like:

You can create a checklist from the + button, then choosing “Checklist”.

You can fill the checklists with simply entering the list items one-by-one, pressing Enter for a new item. Arrow keys will also help you navigate and create new items to the lists (they work both ways - so up-arrow will let you add items to the top of your checklists.)

Plus, there’s now a new color for all the checklists and regular text notes available - brown.

Watch this space for some more news on improvements.

2012-02-08

Post photos for free

Listhings has gone through a major upgrade just recently, and along with increased stability you can now post up to 20 photos for free to Listhings to your canvases.

Go try it out, it’s really easy.

Either simply drag and drop a photo from your local computer or from another website onto a Listhings canvas, and it will be sticked there and kept for as long as you would like it to be kept.
Or click the + button in the upper right corner of the canvas, and choose Picture from the dropdown menu.
3 MB max upload size per photo

Or go Pro!

If you want more than 20 photos, you now have the option to sign up for a Listhings Pro account which gives you as much as 5 GB of storage for photos (that’s enough for millions of medium-size photos). You can sign up either when you bump to the limit, or from your account preferences dialog. Here’s the nitty-gritty:

5 GB of storage for photos
12 MB max upload size per photo
$2.50 per month
Secure sign-up via PayPal
Pay with any major credit card (VISA, MasterCard, AmEx, etc)

Pretty soon, Listhings Pro users can access some cool extra features in addition to being able to upload more photos, so stay tuned and sign up if you’re interested.

As the Valentine’s Day is approaching, it’s a good time to jot down your wish-lists and ideas for presents with Listhings.

2011-09-19

Important information regarding guest usage

Starting from October 10, 2011, Listhings application will no longer be available for guests (i.e. those using Listhings without a password). If you are using Listhings as a guest, you need to create yourself an account. Upon creating yourself an account, all your notes that you have stored on the Listhings page will be transferred to your newly created account.

It’s absolutely free. Besides, you will also have other benefits of being a registered user - such as accessing your notes from other computers (using your email and password to sign in) and multiple canvases.

So, if this concerns you, please sign up as registered user before October 10, 2011. It only takes 30 seconds.

The reason I am asking you to do this is that I am planning some great updates to Listhings - some which could not work with unauthorized users. Also, using Listhings without a password proved to be less secure than I realized.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me at martin@listhings.com.

Thanks!

2011-04-11

Listhings on iPad

Yesterday Listhings switched servers. That went really well. Now I can share some more good news with you.

Listhings is now a bunch of steps more compatible with the iPad. You can pan around the canvases, drag notes around and edit them. While some details (resizing sticky notes horizontally, for example) do not work yet and there might be some small quirks here and there, the overall experience is now much, much smoother.

Oh, and did I mention that real-time sharing works across all platforms? That is, whenever someone updates notes on a canvas from a regular computer, all folks using iPads will see these changes instantly, in real-time, and vice versa.

How to use Listhings on iPad?

Simply open up your web browser
Navigate to Listhings.com
Click the arrow button next to address bar
Choose Add it Home Screen, like this:

2011-04-10

Switching servers

Folks, I’ve finally got some good news for you on stability. I took some time and re-wrote some of the hazy parts of Listhings core code that dealt with real-time communication and sharing. I know, I know, I was super-excited too when I got it all running last year using a technology called APE. The thing is, time has moved on and newer, much more reliable technologies have surfaced. So, I re-engineered most of the hazy parts now to newer technologies, such as Socket.IO (and WebSockets, eventually, which will hopefully make its major come-back soon). But that’s just one part of the good news.

The other part is that we are currently switching our servers. This process should finish within the next few hours. You should not notice the transition in any way, actually. All your notes will be there and you should be able to log in again in a few hours time.

“What’s in it for me?” you might want to ask. What you will get out of this is more stable and reliable service that does not go down daily.

I hope I’ll have some more good news for you soon enough :) Stay tuned.

2010-11-23

Hey, it’s been months. What’s up?

Indeed, it’s been a few months of silence from me here. Let me fix this right now.

So, what’s cooking?

First, Listhings now has over 10,000 users. It happened rather quietly just a few days ago and Listhings now indeed has over ten thousand registerd users. Many donations have been made to support the development as well and I’m very thankful to all those who have done so. Have you donated already?

And second, a new version is in the works. I’ve been tinkering around with different frameworks and APIs such as Recess, CodeIgniter, Kohana and others. (These are web application development frameworks, for those who don’t know). A few months ago I settled on a decent one to base the new version of Listhings on. The new version will include a bunch of new features (one which I can shout out right now is rich text editing but there’ll be a lot more) and improvements on the stability and overall look and feel. I am pretty confident the new version will be released still within this year, 2010.

Now, speaking of stability… some of you might have noticed the frequent 3-5 minute downtimes Listhings has from time to time. I am doing all I can to avoid these but I can’t promise there will be no more such short downtimes until the release of the next version. Starting from the next version, there should be no more such short outages as I am planning to deploy the application into different set-up. On the scale of percentages by the way, the uptime of Listhings services has been around 97% over the last few weeks. This should significantly increase after the next release.

You might also want to ask “Why are these downtimes happening?” Well, it appears even though I am renting a virtual private server for Listhings, I still have to deal with something the hosting provider calls “extensive use”. They seem to have a mechanism in place that blocks the entire site for a few minutes in case it thinks the traffic gets too high (even though I stay within the limits of the virtual server) It’s pretty sad, I know, and I’ve optimized the site every possible way to avoid such blocks. Eventually the new version will be deployed into a completely different server set-up so such errors should be gone for good after the release.

2010-07-21

In this video, published a few weeks ago, Bob Gower from bobcanhelp.com shows how he uses Listhings. Bob Gower is a guy who works with managers and executives at medium-sized software companies to recude their problems delivering software predictably on tight time-lines.

2010-04-18

I’m experimenting with note titles at Listhings. I often use Listhings to store recipes I like. It’s almost always the case where your notes end up with a title on the first line, followed by some content. This is especially the case with recipes. I’ve now tuned Listhings to highlight the first line on notes if the note has more than one line of content. I think it makes sense and provides a good visual way to find what you’re looking for.

What do you think?

You can now share canvases with multiple people more easily. You can add multiple email addresses for sharing, separated with a… guess what? commas or semicolons!

Start sharing

Lost your password?

Just launched the new password reminder tool at Listhings. It uses true random passwords generated by atmospheric noise, with a help of a service called passwd.me.

So in case your password at Listhings is forgotten, come ask for a new one - we’ll literally give you a new password from the skies :)